Swamp economic adviser hearts Silicon Valley start ups

FT: The attention Mr Cohn pays to Uber and other start-ups is part of a broader effort to pick winners in Silicon Valley.According to insiders, senior executives at Goldman were kicking themselves for not building enough relationships to win top roles on the initial public offerings of Facebook and LinkedIn — misses that caused the bank to drop down the rankings of technology underwriters between 2010 and 2012.Now, Mr Cohn makes a point of meeting private start-ups when he is in San Francisco.His coast-to-coast shuttles point to a challenge that all investment banks are facing in Silicon Valley: as fast-growing tech companies such as Uber and Airbnb stay in private ownership for longer, bankers must come up with more ways to ingratiate themselves in advance of a public stock offering.

Official Swamp economist, and a regulator also.    This guy should know about our plot to release Singularity 1.0 onto the world.

What does he know?
He must have been the guy who got GS into the block chain consortium, then out of it again.  So he knows the network effect problem of block chain. He will know about Black-Scholes option trading, so he likely has heard about trading pit.  I mean, if he was involved in R3, then he has sat through many presentations of Fintech.

He is a natural trader, and self taught in options trading.  But not deep in entropy theory, but he will get the basics.  He is the guy to watch, who does he visit with, his views on productivity, does he really grasp the new money technology? Is he still delusional about the letter_to_janet() call, we aren't making it?   Press him on digital currencies, see what he thinks. Also find out if he has the Magic Walrus delusion.  And, press him on rate fixing, we know they do it.